Indian MNCs Willing To Invest In RIM

Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) is the next buzz word in IT with RIM expected to grow into an industry in itself by 2013 generating a revenue of $26 - $28 billion, according to a Nasscom study. Biztech2.0 caught up with Microland – one of the pioneers in RIM services – to talk about the opportunities they see in India as a market for their services. In a brief conversation, Sharad Heda, COO – Microland, reveals that though dollar wise small compared to the global market, India is an outstanding emerging market and Indian MNCs are willing to invest in mission critical IT infrastructure management services.

What’s happening in the remote IT infrastructure management space?

As you might be aware, the Indian remote IT infrastructure management industry will grow exponentially from the current $6-$7 billion to a whopping $26 - $28 billion by 2013. The main areas of focus will be reliability, delivery, process and tools and business continuity process. The main reason why remote infrastructure management is catching up in India is because of the development in the western world. For one, the developed world has always been extremely people intensive and completely missed out on intensifying their processes, added to this is the talent crunch they are facing. At this backdrop, these western customers are rendered a combination of expertise and credibility by Indian vendors.

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How have you divided your focus between Indian and global markets?

Our market focus between India and global is in a ratio of 20:80 for the simple reason that the size of global deals are much bigger. However, there’s one fundamental difference between Indian and global deals – while in global deals, because of the size of enterprises, only specific pieces of technologies are outsourced; in India the entire gamut of IT infrastructure management is outsourced.

Though dollar wise it is still small compared to global market, India is an outstanding emerging market where Indian MNCs are fast becoming billion dollar companies with a willingness to invest in mission critical IT infrastructure management services. Also, most of the Indian companies are growing at a rate of 60% so when our clients grow at that rate we grow at the same pace. Further work in India is getting more mission critical.

An Indian customer doesn’t get any cost benefit, then why would he outsource the IT infrastructure management to a vendor based out of India?

While there’s no labour cost benefit, retention of IT talent is a huge issue in these enterprises. There’s also the issue of ensuring robustness of the IT system, as technology keeps changing. While for enterprises, this is a secondary area of focus where they cannot spend too much of resources, for vendors, IT infrastructure support is the core business. In this sense, they are assured of getting best of services for their essential but secondary area of focus. Added to this, most of the enterprises specially backs have around 50 to 60 branches across India – remote infrastructure renders the advantage of having centralised IT system run out of the corporate office but managed remotely by a third party with whom the customer shares a close proximity.

What kind of challenges do Indian enterprises face with regard to infrastructure?

Apart from capabilities and talent, the other daunting issue that Indian enterprises face when it comes to infrastructure management, is scaling up to the growth. While most of these companies register furious growth percentages, they would rather spend time on furthering core company business than worrying about infrastructure issues. So as they grow bigger in size, management of infrastructure becomes complex. So what they most critically require is a service that can ensure their IT infrastructure is always up and running.

For Indian enterprises, while availability and reliability of hardware and software are no more an issue; core technical performance and scaling up are becoming daunting. However the biggest issue that India could be facing today in terms of infrastructure management is security. We need specialised expertise within the infrastructure management discipline that can address this challenge.

Within IT infrastructure management, which service is generating the highest demand?

IT infrastructure management is segmented into various components – networking, mainframes, mid range, end user support, messaging, security and helpdesk. Given the size of Indian enterprises, most of them go for a complete end-to-end solution. In most of the BPO and software companies, which are extremely people intensive, end user support comprising desktop support and helpdesk are high in demand.

However, demand for mid range support services is also catching up fast. Any enterprise’s core data sits on mid range servers. No one can afford to go wrong with it. A focused data centre support with 24/7 support is mandatory. This is where maximum resources need to be invested. Hence the size of deals is also large. Maintaining mid range servers is extremely expensive for businesses with a different core focus, whereas an IT infrastructure services provider with core focus being infrastructure not only gives operational advantage but a wide range of expertise like IBM, HP Unix, Solaris etc.